TheWorld Business Forum held its seventh annual gathering of international business leaders in New York City this past October, with an agenda broadly focused on inno- vation and trends in global business—as well as on leader- ship. For two days, rock stars in the worlds of business and politics took the stage at Radio City Music Hall, including Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric; for- mer Vice President Al Gore; Jim Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great; film writer, producer, and director James Cameron; David Gergen, an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton; and dozens more. With more than 4,500 attendees in 2010, theWorld Busi-
ness Forum is the single largest gathering of senior executives in the nation. But the emphasis is on opening up the event to evenmore people and fostering a sense of community around the conference, according to Santiago Muro,sen- ior vice president of sales and operations forHSM USA,which organizes theWorld Business Forum. Added Sebastian Mackinlay, HSM USA’s senior vice president ofmarketing and sales:“We know that thousands of executives would love to be able to get access to the conference. But they don’t all have the money or time to travel.”
For the first time this year, HSM webcast the event. Approximately 5,000 people purchased online passes—a number that the company expects will double or triple next year. And many thousands more people came into contact with the World Business Forum through social media. For the second year, HSM invited top business bloggers to be part of a “Blogger Hub” at the conference. Sixty showed up, including writers from mainstream media outlets such as TheWashingtonPostand TheWallStreetJournal, and online superstars like lifestyle-industry entrepreneur Jonathan Fields. The 60 bloggers, many of them with thousands of fol- lowers, had a compounding effect on the spread of the ideas expressed at the conference, said George Levy, HSM Americas’ e-business director. Their tweets, combined with those of conference attendees, put the 2010 World Busi- ness Forum in the top 10 trending topics world- wide on Twitter at some points during the conference. But the best part was that the bloggers
brought their own intellectual capital to the con- ference. Through their blog posts, Levy said, they reflected the content through “60 different prisms.”
as well as blogs that follow PopTech meetings and initiatives. Likewise, The Economist magazine created a website
(http://ideas.econony.com) to accompany a new series of con- ferences it launched under the heading“The Ideas Economy.” Held inNewYork City and Berkeley, Calif., the conferences— which Frog Design’s Jason Severs, a consultant for the events, describes as “deep dives” into the area of ideas and innovation —“explore issues at the commanding heights of the global economy, as well as the root of human progress and human potential under the banner of The Economist.”
For example, the second conference in the series, Human
“Any place can be creative if you pay attention to it, and cultivate it.And creativity can be suppressed, in business and learning.”
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Potential 2010, held Sept. 15–16 at Pier 60 overlookingthe Hudson River in New York City, addressed the nature of the human capital that will be needed in the economy of the future. Human Potential 2010 asked the question “How do we edu- cate billions of new people in the comingdecades—and man- age their successful entry into the global economy—in an age of high unemployment and aging demographics?” The con- ference brought together 90 speakers billed as “the smartest minds from government, academia, and business” to debate and collaborate on solutions. The speaker lineup lived up to the hype, with presenters includingWhite House domestic-policy adviser Melody Barnes; Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Great Reset; Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus; and ShirleyM. Tilghman, president of Princeton University. Human Potential also wanted to find a way to tap into the
creativity and ideas of the 200 attendees. Usually when atten- dees arrive at a conference, they’re greeted with an information packet that orients them to the exact schedule they’ll be fol- lowing for the next few days.“You see people talking, you hear the ideas floating around,” Severs said, “but there’s generally not a means of capturingthose ideas.” At Human Potential, organizers gave each attendee a deck of cards, dubbed “Playables,” designed to change the dynamics of social inter-